TONGA - NEW ZEALAND 1950

HOW AND WHY PEOPLES’
PARTICIPATION IN ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES HAS CHANGED, AND THE CONSEQUENCES
OF THIS

Organising people to produce
bananas

Andrew Afeaki says:My father was driven in similar vein to him spending months and
months fund raising for the scholarships in the mid late 40s. In the early
sixties through the vehicle of the ‘Api Fo’ou College Old Boys,
he had decided as President of the Old Boys Association they needed to do
more than just meet once a year as old boys and celebrate their coming together.
He and Dr Leopino Foliaki, and Laitia Fifita, were the main players. They
put up a proposal to the AGM of the old boys in the early 60s that they
should take the opportunity of banana exports to New Zealand, grow bananas
and export them through the produce board, for them to earn a living. Only
a few of the old boys had jobs, like Leopino Foliaki, a doctor, my father
as a lawyer, Fifita as a weatherman in Tonga. There was not that many actually
in jobs. They set about organizing committees in each of the villages, of
old boys. They set monthly targets. They must have so many banana trees
planted – every one of the members of the old boys network in the
villages. They went out to the villages and inspected it. They did this
for three years. Banana production just kept increasing through the sixties
into 1968-69 when they had reached about 600,000 cases. But most of that
huge increase of banana exports in Tonga was driven by that simple people
organisation. Other people joined in with the old boys. But bananas were
then hit by disease in the 1970s onward, and killed it. But there was a
huge influx of cash income into Tonga.